1. Field of the Invention
The presently disclosed subject matter relates to a website browsing system, server and client terminal, and in particular, to a website browsing system, server and client terminal for browsing and operating a website for a PC (personal computer) on a client terminal, such as a mobile phone, which has restriction of screen size and downloadable file size.
2. Description of the Related Art
Apparently, there are many situations of browsing websites using a mobile phone in recent years. However, creation of websites for a mobile phone in addition to websites for a PC takes a great deal of effort and cost. Therefore, website creators are reluctant to create websites for a mobile phone. Accordingly, there may often be cases where websites posting information that users want to browse include sites for web-browsing by a PC only and do not include sites for web-browsing by a mobile phone.
When a user browses a website for a PC using a mobile phone whose screen size and downloadable file size are smaller than those of the PC, a content file may be received in a divided manner and displayed over a plurality of pages. In this case, appearances (page layout) of the webpage may be different compared to a case when a PC is used to browse the webpage.
Instead, conversion into a markup language for a mobile phone may be adopted. However, the conversion tends to cause a problem of deterioration in design.
In order to addressing this problem, a method for creating an image of a website for a PC to display the image on a mobile phone has been proposed. For example, according to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-220260, in an image distribution server, a webpage is created from elements of a HTML document of an acquired webpage, the created webpage is converted into image data such as a bitmap and then transmitted to a client terminal (mobile phone). When a user clicks using a pointing device a character string or the like displayed on a client terminal displaying the image data, click position coordinate data and the URL of the displayed webpage are transmitted to the image distribution server. The image distribution server examines whether a link pointer corresponding to the transmitted click position coordinates exists or not on the basis of the constituent elements of the webpage. If the link pointer exists, the image distribution server accesses to a web server located by the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) indicated by the link pointer.
The technique in the Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-220260 enables to browse a webpage using even a client terminal in which a web browser is not implemented.